Thiago Macieira says in his blog: "With commit 546830, KDE says good-bye to one of its longest friends: DCOP. The technology has served us well for 6 years, to the point that has become one of our most proeminent features." From now on, the KDE 4 tree will use DBUS. Due to the very extensive use of DCOP in KDE, this is a big jump for DBUS, "probably bring[ing] more applications into D-BUS in one go than there currently are".

DBUS is not really a GNOME technology.
It was carefully designed to be desktop agnostic and meet various peoples needs. It uses pure C at its core (no glib) and is security audited. Havoc Pennington wisely drives developement (taking care of any personal issues) with clear goal of making it de facto linux (free unix?) high level IPC.